...re trying to make so forgive me if I am out to lunch, but this matters naught to the consumer. This is just back-office dealings that either adds $5 to the cost of a laptop or doesn't. It's there vendors choice what licenses they pay or don't pay. Then they get to set the price on their laptop after it all shapes out.
If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.
BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.
Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?
Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.
With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.
If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.
"Your teeth will get through anything," Mr. Kayll advised. "But it will bloody well hurt."
Speak for yourself, my teeth will barely get through a cheese sandwich at my age.
There's nothing like a good smack to the beitzim to stop a would-be rapist. And there's nothing like biting someone if it's all the leverage you have.
Remember, this is not a video game or a sanctioned fight in a boxing ring. This is your life versus the life of a terrorist or other attacker. Kill or be killed. Learn to fight.
The problem is, it's going to take a number of years before EV batteries actually need recycling. Even after 10 years, many are still good enough for EV use. And after that, they are often useful in other places like home power storage or grid batteries. And this isn't recycling the cells, this is reusing the cells - taking the cells out of an EV and putting them into use in another application directly. So it might be 20 to 30 years before enough volume of EV batteries are scrapped.
There are already several companies that want to scale up their recycling, but they just don't have enough used batteries to scale.
Heck, even when an EV is written off and scrapped, the battery is often snapped up as it's still valuable - even damaged people extract and use the cells for other purposes, or rebuilding EV batteries.
So yeah, here's part of the issue. Car shredders. Crushed cars don't just get dumped into big pits of molten steel, crushed cars get shredded with large high speed hammermills and the component materials - iron/steel, aluminum - get separated out by magnetic and eddy current separators. The rest is called Auto Shredder Residue and ends up landfilled. It's all the copper and the materials that used to be glass and plastic dashboards and o-rings in Macpherson struts and stuff like that.
If you haven't seen ASR, it's a relatively fine grain, probably mostly under 0.5", and with modern cars, it's mostly plastic.
If you drop a Tesla into a car shredder (the eventual fate of most cars), I think the batteries will end up as ASR. And then you're trying to separate cobalt battery components from the old stuffed toys left in the back seat.
How do we shred this better, and why are we not already doing this with municipal waste? Hammermills have windage losses and crazy internal wear. Low veolcity high torque machines need even worse maintenance. Robots to disassemble cars seems like a good idea, until you've actually worked in an automotive wrecking yard and seen that cars often no longer look like cars....
There we go. Heavy water, the ultimate in pricey bottled water.
Move over, Perrier. This one's got kick!
It's neat that we can taste the difference, and if bottled water suppliers can mass produce it as a beverage it will surely reduce the operating costs of some types of nuclear reactors.
it's that there's not enough pressure. There are flushing systems that can produce a lot more pressure even when only using a small amount of water, but I don't think I've ever seen one in a home in the US.
Our toilets are much the same here in Canada - residential use toilets are gravity-fed with typically 6L per flush from a "close-coupled" tank which is mounted directly on top of the bowl. The tank is filled from municipal or well supply, which is typically at 50PSI or so, but the fill valve is the only part of the system under pressure.
They operate by momentum, not by pressure. m1*v1 = m2*v2. The pressure would be limited by the head, which is typically only 2 feet or so. The secret to their effectiveness is allowing 6 kilograms of water to accelerate as quickly as possible in the height allowed by the design and have it collide with the
Most residential plumbing systems use 1/2" ID supply pipe which would simply not allow a pressurized flush like a commercial toilet to be effective. There are exceptions which use bladder systems to attempt to leverage the standing water pressure of the municipal water supply to drive the flush water down to the bowl as quickly as possible. These systems tend to be expensive, unreliable, and loud, although one day these issues may be resolved.
Improvements to the existing system will require very carefully designed bowls and trapways and exceptionally well-installed plumbing with regard to soil pipe slope and venting. My own home is outfitted with 3L per flush toilets which do an admirable job - I have yet to clog them, even after a visit to a buffet restaurant - despite being purely momentum-based close-coupled toilets without the additional complexity and failure-prone seals in dual-flush mechanisms.
Adding technology is not the answer to this problem. Keeping it as simple as possible but doing the basics really well is key.
My father was a kid in the '30s, and he never had a reel to reel. Vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD was his Hi Fi experience. Vinyl was the winner at home, and 8-track for the car. I was a kid in the 70s and never saw one, except in computers.
ALL tape formats, whether open-reel or inside a cassette or cartridge, are vulnerable to this form of failure. So your dad's 8-tracks and cassettes are hardly immune. In fact, 8-tracks, even when they're not left in the sun on car dashboards, die because they're an endless loop and the glue that holds the metal foil splice that signals the track change has a tendency to fail... and the lubricant on the tape might even exacerbate the failure of the binding. 8-tracks were marginal at best when they were new; most machines of the day basically knocked their heads out of alignment four times with each album. But they were designed for car audio at a time when a good car sound system was a 5x7" speaker in the dashboard and road noise drowned out the tape hiss.
The Philips Compact Cassette (a cassette, to most people) was designed for dictation machines where sound quality was not a design criteria. It's a miracle of our technology that they ever sounded good enough for things like the Sony Walkman to happen.
I was a kid in the 70s, and while reel-to-reel was on its way out by then, I still remember seeing them as parts of my friends' parents' hi-fi setups. They were beautiful pieces of equipment.
The machines were, and still are, beautiful. Good ones were usually pretty expensive and represented the state of the art in their day, like a flagship smartphone or laptop computer now. Even obsolete, you can see the quality and the beauty.
But the real problem is the recordings. It's not just stuff like home recordings off the radio, it's original masters of albums. The Beatles early BBC stuff was recorded on Ferrograph machines (I love that name, think about what it means). God only knows what the tape formulation was; iron oxide, for sure, but what were the binders?
Most Slashdotters will be familiar with cassettes moving the tape at 1-7/8 inches per second. 7-1/2 inches per second was common in home audio. 15 inches per second in professional/studio audio use was fairly slow! At those speeds, as the tape plays, the oxide breaks free from the binder and blocks the head gap pretty quickly. Slowing down the tape and digitally replaying it faster might help, but it doesn't change the fact that A Day In The Life is a lot of tape at 15IPS - and a it's distance, not speed, that really clogs the head gaps. 5 minutes and 35 seconds is 418 feet of tape at 15IPS. No matter how quickly or slowly you play it, you could tie one end to the balcony railing of a 42nd floor apartment and the reel would still be unwinding when it hits the sidewalk below. And that's A Day In The Life, not something crazy long!
Now you add video recording with high-velocity spinning video heads to tape with flaky backing, and you're going to have a real problem playing this media down the road. You need the machine, stable tape, and someone who actually knows how to do it.
With commercial video formats far before VHS, there aren't many people alive who know how to maintain and run an Ampex Quad machine, for example. And with that, it's the end of countless hours of video recordings since the dawn of VTRs in the 1950s - Dr. Who, Coronation Street, WKRP. Life-altering news events, triumphs and tragedies. This is akin to losing our literary history because no one knows how to read.
Many things can go wrong so it is, unless shit really hits the fan, at best year away from approval
C19 is already killing 3000 people per day. It is past time to take our foot off the brake. We need to find a cure or vaccine. The emphasis needs to shift from caution to urgency.
Yeah. This could easily result in more deaths than World War II. Don't be flippant about this. This is the biggest crisis since then.
I am in a high-risk population for bad complications to this disease, and probably a great many Slashdotters are. Come on, we don't generally lead the healthiest lifestyles.
Give me one of those stickers now. I'll take my chances. Someone's got to be the test pilot for every new fighter jet design, right?
there was a ton of work done and then abandoned on a general purpose Corona virus vaccine (it wasn't profitable and governments didn't have money to fund it).
This is likely built off that work, and we might get lucky. That said the doctor from that video expected it to take another 18-24 months to finish the work. So yes, we should be wary. Trust but Verify, as the saying goes.
Okay; not guaranteed to work yet, I get it. But already scalable to mass production, unrefrigerated transportation in the form of a flat sticker in the mail, and basically a "Place on clean hairless skin anywhere on your body. Leave sticker on until it falls off." is a hell of a lot faster/cheaper/safer and with more population compliance than an injection campaign. Even if it only protects 25% of patients, it's already a game-changer in herd immunity or herd isolation. So what are the chances that this is safe on humans?
If it's safe on humans, then yeah, I'll be a guinea pig for a study. Just don't give me the placebo.
[...] But the government was always going to need to step in and regulate this. Firstly in case of accident it's not clear where the liability lies. And secondly without regulation people will not accept it unless it reaches unrealistic levels of safety. Even being 1000x safer than human drivers wouldn't be OK. If anything that would be worse because as it is traffic accidents don't make the news, but if self driving cars had only say 10 accidents per year, all 10 would be newsworthy. Not only that but the accidents may well be ones that an alert, well trained, skilled human driver would not have made, because self driving systems will likely have different accidents.
Yup.
The car doesn't need to know or care whether it's a cat or a dog running across the road, only that it should avoid hitting it. Things become more difficult when it's a black cat or a pothole - which is it? Easy enough for a human to decide, hard as hell for a computer.
Now, is that a plastic bag blowing in the wind, or is that a toddler running across the road? Does your computer make a decision to cause an accident with another car (and its relatively-well protected occupants) to avoid hitting a plastic bag that could have looked like a child running across the street?
These are HUGE issues in autonomous vehicle design, and there are no easy answers.
Because safety is involved people want to see that Tesla are beyond reproach. This is not only unrealistic but harmful. No organisation is beyond reproach, mistakes will be made, corners will be cut and stupid decisions will be made. That's a consequence of it being done by humans. And not only that, engineers will make money-death tradeoffs, essentially working out the cost of a life in dollars. People outside engineering don't like that on the whole and seem shocked if you tell them, but it's impossible to engineer a safety critical system without such calculations.
Just look at the Ford Pinto gas tank fiasco. In reality, the car was every bit as safe as other hatchbacks at the time. Toyota, whose manufacturing is above reproach, somehow shipped over 200,000 Corollas missing something as seemingly obvious as a speaker - what if it had been a little safety clip in the brakes or front suspension? In 1970s Honda Civics, the passenger could apply the brakes just by pushing too hard on the floor. That didn't make the news because it didn't have leaked internal memos which costed out the deaths and the payouts. This was a central theme in the great 1999 movie Fight Club, and the unnamed protagonist's eventual inability to reconcile what he was seeing with the tradeoffs engineers have to make in their line of work.
I could build you the safest car on the planet. But it would cost you $500,000, would be ugly as sin, would get 5 miles to the gallon on a good day with a nice tailwind, and I wouldn't make money to use for research and innovation and shareholder profit on it. And, most importantly, no one would want it in their driveway.
Risk is a consequence of doing anything. And Engineering is a profession of balancing design constraints to achieve a good outcome.
The important question is whether it is safer enough than human driving. There's a strong tendency to accept the status quo a somehow better by default simply because it's there. As it is, every time I drive and see other drivers I feel that almost any vaguely functional self driving capability is likely to be better[*]. The autopilot is stupid and reactive, but it is never sleep deprived, never angry, never frustrated, never yells at its kids, never reads its phone or sends messages, never hassles other drivers, never gets scared by being hassled, and so on.
...never drives drunk... never has a sneezing fit... never has a seizure...
These things are literally two separate and identical computers which decide together what to do. And I'll bet money that when the SpaceX Dragon capsules have docked autonomously with the International Space Station, the computers controlling the Dragon weren't all that different from what's inside every Tesla Autopilot system. Different software and firmware for sure, but I'd bet there'll be Tesla logos on those circuit boards in a few places.
Tesla and SpaceX are not automotive and aerospace companies. They're computer companies which specialize in a ground-up approach to applying high-reliability real-time systems to old problems.
The useful question is what is the accident rate of autopilot vs human. Given that I have no idea if the autopilot is good enough, but I still feel that's the important question.
And that's it. A car accident doesn't make the news unless it's spectacularly tragic. If an autonomous car takes out a stop sign to avoid a gopher, it's news.
I don't think the autonomous technology is ready for the road yet, certainly not here in Ottawa, Canada, with our climate. But yeah, it's coming, and it will soon be safer per kilometer than any human driver.
[*]I'm an excellent driver of course and rate myself above average much like 80% of all drivers...
At least you understand the Dunning-Kruger effect. You are therefore already a better driver than the vast majority of the people on the road.
Tomorrow's computers some time next month. -- DEC
